Interesting Links for 22-10-2012

[andrewducker]

• The Swedish serial killer who never was (20 years of drug-ridden confessions, and it sounds like none of them were true).
  (tags: drugs sweden murder EpicFail )
• Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually
  (tags: materials failure technology design )
• Playing LA Noire with your grandfather, who was an LA beat cop

Comments

[drplokta]

In the Amazon case, she was a Norwegian buying books in the UK Kindle store, which is a breach of Amazon's terms & conditions. It's for UK residents only, and that's not Amazon's fault -- the publishers insist on it. So it's hardly surprising that her account was terminated.

We need a change in the legal framework to allow regional copyright licences to be based only on the location of the vendor, and not on the location of the purchaser, but without that there's nothing that Amazon can do.

[andrewducker]

Is that clear from the article? (Edit: The site has gone down under load, and I can't view Google Cache from work.)

Doesn't seem to quite tie up with their mention of another associated account.

[supergee]

No, not at all.

[drplokta]

There's simply no way for a Norwegian to buy Kindle books from Amazon without telling some lies somewhere, so I suspect that we may not be getting the whole truth in what has been posted.

Joseph K. had opened an Amazon account…

[livejournal]

User supergee referenced to your post from Joseph K. had opened an Amazon account… saying: [...] Outlawed by Amazon DRM. There appears to be a somewhat reasonable explanation [...]

[gonzo21]

Holy crap, I had no idea the US did virtually no safety testing on GMO food products.

[cairmen]

The LA Noire article is really touching. Good link.

[andrewducker]

Glad you liked it. It's always nice to see games bringing people together.

[despotliz]

I don't many links to hand, as it was a few weeks ago I read them, but the French GMO study is not a good study, they did some exceedingly dodgy things with the press embargo to try and get articles about it published without any outside expert opinion, and the lead author of the study has a book coming out shortly that they would like to sell.

[alitheapipkin]

Their sample size is 20, they may as well not have bothered. The first thing I got taught in experimental design classes was that you always have to have a big enough sample size to get statistically significant differences between treatment groups.

[errolwi]

Yes, this study and the associated PR management was recently torn apart by one of the sceptical podcasts I listen to.